Fedora 10 and Firefox upgrade complaints


My displeasure grows with my latest upgrade.  f10 on my laptop caused my firefox and evolution sessions to always start up in offline mode.  I'm never in offline mode – I have a cable modem and I'm always connected to the Internet.  So I wasn't sure why things had changed.  It turns out, after a bit of googling, that the new networkmanager system is the cause of these problems.

Network Managers was introduced in f9 to better handle wireless connections.  However, it doesn't do much for me as I still configured using the older network service.  While Network Manager didn't appear to get in my way in F9, having it running in F10 caused Evolution and Firefox to run in offline mode even though I was actually connected to the network.  The way to fix this is to edit your /etc/sysconfig/network file and add the following line:

NETWORKWAIT=1

and then disable Network Manager from starting by using chkconfig and service:

sudo chkconfig –levels 2345 NetworkManager off

sudo service NetworkManager stop

Once I did this both Evolution and Firefox now startup in the correct mode (online).  Mauriat Miranda's Personal Fedora 9 Installation Guide discusses this in a little more detail.

Even with this fixed, I'm not happy with F10 on my laptop.  Performance (re: responsiveness) is considerably worse.  I ran a test print through system-config-printer via a remote CUPS printer and the former locked up.  The print goes through okay but any prints from Firefox have no images included in them – I just get gray blocks.  The printer is connected via USB on another fedora 9 system and was working fine with Firefox in this print configuration with F9 on my laptop.  Something about F10 or Firefox on F10 has changed.

Another printing issue is that when a print is requested in Firefox the print dialog does not immediately show the CUPS connected printer.  You have to wait a few seconds for it to show up.  This didn't happen in F9.  It may be the connected printer is configured incorrectly.  I'm never quite clear on how to get a remote CUPS printer to work with my laptop and always have to google for help on that after an upgrade.  This time around I had to make a minor change to cups.conf on the server to allow remote connections and add an entry in client.conf on the laptop to make the remote printer show up.  I don't remember having to do that previously (and my backups from F9 of the cups config on the laptop don't show such a configuration in the client.conf file).

So things are working on F10, but not as well as under F9.  I'm disappointed, to say the least, but worse is I may have to back-rev  to F9 before I give my presentation at a local user group in order to get my dual monitors workings correctly (and with some speed).

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.